Is It Possible to Test Escential Workers in Nursing Homes?

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i think some of my favorite ideas action art necesarily on radical markets, but on radical exchange ideas more broadly dand yet relaely. What do you think of the plans that say we should try to predict who as a super spreader and then test them incredibly often? And maybe we won't get that far in universal testing, but we'll get most of the gains by testing nurses, testing people who shake hands a lot, testing the extra verts, whoever people are at these nodes. So i certainly support some forms of that. I think testing escential workers, especially in long term care facilities where there is a possibility, not just for a lot of spread,...

Glen Weyl is an economist, researcher, and founder of RadicalXChange. He recently co-authored a paper that sets forth an ambitious strategy to respond to the crisis and mitigate long-term damage to the economy through a regime of testing, tracing, and supported isolation. In his estimation the benefit-cost ratio is ten to one, with costs equal to about one month of continued freeze in place.

Tyler invited Glen to discuss the plan, including how it’d overcome obstacles to scaling up testing and tracing, what other countries got right and wrong in their responses, the unusual reason why he’s bothered by price gouging on PPE supplies, where his plan differs with Paul Romer’s, and more. They also discuss academia’s responsibility to inform public discourse, how he’d apply his ideas on mechanism design to reform tenure and admissions, his unique intellectual journey from socialism to libertarianism and beyond, the common element that attracts him to both the movie Memento and Don McLean’s “American Pie,” what talent he looks for in young economists, the struggle to straddle the divide between academia and politics, the benefits and drawbacks of rollerblading to class, and more.

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Recorded April 20th, 2020 Other ways to connect

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